October 27, 2016

Busanhaeng

by Franz Patrick

Busanhaeng (2016)
★★★ / ★★★★

There comes a point in “Train to Busan,” written and directed by Sang-ho Yeon, where the viewers are forced to consider who the true monsters are: the ravenous undead, presumably infected by a virus, acting upon the biological need to spread the infection or the healthy men and women who must make choices on whether or not their fellow uninfected deserve a chance to live given the possibility that they have been exposed to the presumed virus. It is clear that this is when the material is at its most compelling.

We have seen this type of zombie before: fast-moving, they often swarm, and nearly impossible to incapacitate, as if the pain sensors in their brain have been disabled completely. The facial and bodily cosmetics are spot-on and convincing, no detail considered to be too small or insignificant despite the fact that the living dead rapidly twitch and contort, supported by rapid camera movements and swift editing. The willingness to have such a level of detail pays off during the calculated closeups of the flesh eaters; it makes them all the more terrifying and quite beautiful to look at.

Although the plot involves a zombie apocalypse in South Korea, we see story unfold from the perspective of a fund manager father and his neglected young daughter who are unable to relate to one another. They are so disconnected, the little girl, Soo-an (Soo-an Kim), tells her father, Seok Woo (Yoo Gong), that her birthday wish is to be with her mother in Busan—her father does not have to come, if he so chooses, he simply must take her to the bullet train.

There is great scene in the middle of the picture that defines their divide. After offering her seat to an old woman, the girl is pulled aside by her father and he tells her that she needn’t be so kind, especially during tough times—she needs to look out only for herself. The daughter looks at her parent with not only disappointment but also shame. But this is not a story about the father learning to become a better parent because that is to assume that Seok Woo and Soo-an will survive till the end. The material consistently makes a point that the story is about survival. The two just happen to be in the middle of it.

Despite a handful of great decisions by the filmmakers, there is one detail that is left overlooked, inexcusable for a two-hour film. That is, it fails to provide an explanation, even a superficial one, as to why certain individuals turn into zombies right after they are bitten but others have at least a few minutes. We get the impression that the conversion functions through convenience: Those considered to be the “more important” characters are given a chance to say goodbye, one way or another, in order to make us more emotional. This does not fit the survival angle of the story because, in reality, sometimes deaths are so sudden, there is no goodbye or resolution. There is only shock, terror, being forced to move forward for the time being.

“Busanhaeng” stands out from other zombie movies because it takes place mostly inside a bullet train where space is highly limited and an infection can spread like wildfire. A memorable scene involves one party having to move through several train cars in order to get to their loved ones… but the cars in between are plagued with the undead. They cannot get to their destination with strength alone. Not even with just smarts. Luck plays a role, but even that’s not enough. The picture bursts with small creativities and delivers expected thrills.

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

I’m as guilty as anyone, because I helped to herald the digital era with “Jurassic Park.” But the danger is that it can be abused to the point where nothing is eye-popping any more. The difference between making “Jaws” thirty-one years ago and “War of the Worlds” is that today, anything I can imagine, I can realize on film. Then, when my mechanical shark was being repaired and I had to shoot something, I had to make the water scary. I relied on the audience’s imagination, aided by where I put the camera. Today, it would be a digital shark. It would cost a hell of a lot more, but never break down. As a result, I probably would have used it four times as much, which would have made the film four times less scary. “Jaws” is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do. We need to bring the audience back into partnership with storytelling.

I’ve discovered I’ve got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

Stanley Kubrick

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

I’ve always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we’re looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But “The Shining” didn’t originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: “Jack must be imagining these things because he’s crazy.” This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters.

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.

Werner Herzog

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about… and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

Alfred Hitchcock

Four people are sitting around a table talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now, take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and will go off in five minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different because you’ve given them that information. In five minutes time that bomb will go off. Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they’re saying to you, “Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball. There’s a bomb under there.” You’ve got the audience working.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Ken Loach

Why do they say I hate my country? And what does that even mean? Am I supposed to hate my town, am I supposed to hate all English people, or my government? And if I do hate my government, does that mean I hate my country? It’s a democratic duty to criticize the government.

A movie isn’t a political movement, a party, or even an article. It’s just a film. At best it can add its voice to public outrage.

Pedro Almodóvar

Yes, women are stronger than us. They face more directly the problems that confront them, and for that reason they are much more spectacular to talk about. I don’t know why I am more interested in women, because I don’t go to any psychiatrists, and I don’t want to know why.

I think decor says a lot about someone’s social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work, and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

My school and the cinema were only a few buildings apart on the same street. The bad education I received at school was rectified when I went to the cinema. My religion became the cinema. Of course one could create one’s own belief system, and anything that helps or supports you in life can be seen as covering the function of religion. In that sense you could consider cinema my religion, because it is one of my major stimuli that I have for living. Cinema has that aspect of devotion to saints and idolatry as well. In that sense it is entirely religious.

Terrence Malick

Experience it like a walk in the countryside. You’ll probably be bored or have other things in mind, but perhaps you will be struck, suddenly, by a feeling, by an act, by a unique portrait of nature.

Louis Malle

You must find the note, the correct key, for your story. If you find it, everything will work. If you do not, everything will stick out like elbows.

I think predictability has become the rule and I’m completely the opposite–I like spectators to be disturbed.

Martin Scorsese

When I did “The Age of Innocence,” the critics said, “Is it wrong to expect a little more heat from Scorsese?” I thought “The Age of Innocence” was pretty hot. So I said, “Alright, I’ll do ‘Casino,'” and they said, “Well, gee, it’s the same as ‘Goodfellas.'” You can’t win. Yes, “Casino” has the style of “GoodFellas,” but it has more to do with America–and even Hollywood: the idea of never being satisfied.

“L’avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than “Breathless” or “Hiroshima, mon amour.” Or “La dolce vita”. At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La dolce vita,” but I was challenged by “L’avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. I was mesmerized by “L’avventura” and by Antonioni’s subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysteries–or, rather, the mystery of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul.

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

In “L’enfant,” we have a main character, Bruno, a man who cannot be a father, who is never able to be a father, and it feels like at the end of the movie he at last became a father. Well, I’m not sure things will be OK afterwards. But it seems like when they’re in the prison, where people can speak with their families, I think he says, “How’s Jimmy, how is he doing?” Well, he never said the name of the kid before. It means that he has changed. Because of the kid that he has saved from the water, Steve, he became someone else. It takes time. So we felt that it was the right moment to end the movie. Our movies are like portraits.

We haven’t found any place or room for music in our movies. Maybe because we are not able to find the right music, I don’t know. And when we’re shooting, I think that’s where things happen actually. When we’re building our plans, et cetera, the rhythm of that construction is partly based on the sounds, not only the dialogues, but touching the objects. And rhythm is based on the sounds that we can hear on the set, the noise of the bodies moving, the breathing of the characters, that’s our music. We just don’t see the need for music. When we’re shooting we just don’t think about it.

I think one of the big wishes of the human kind is to transform things, to work on things to construct, to destroy, to sometimes construct again. And not only to look at the world, let’s say, passively. I think that’s the aim of humankind, being a man, a woman, is to change things. And cinema is about showing things that are changing.

宮崎 駿 | Hayao Miyazaki

I would like to make a film to tell children, “It’s good to be alive.”

I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live–if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.

Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It’s a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually oppressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own–a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world. I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It’s a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it’s that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime.

Wes Craven

You don’t enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you… dealt with and put into a narrative.

What you want to do is you want to put your audience off-balance. You have to be aware of what the audience’s expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren’t looking.

I think the experience of going to a theater and seeing a movie with a lot of people is still part of the transformational power of film, and it’s equivalent to the old shaman telling a story by the campfire to a bunch of people. That is a remarkable thing… If you scream and everyone else in the audience screams, you realize that your fears are not just within yourself, they’re in other people as well, and that’s strangely releasing.

Quentin Tarantino

If you’re a film fan, collecting video is sort of like marijuana. Laser discs, they’re definitely cocaine. Film prints are heroin, all right? You’re shooting smack when you start collecting film prints. So, I kinda got into it in a big way, and I’ve got a pretty nice collection I’m real proud of.

The exploitation films were made in such an artless way with these big wide shots of Sunset Boulevard or of Arcadia or downtown L.A. or wherever. In mainstream films, especially in the 1980s, the Los Angeles you saw wasn’t the real one; it was a character with this backlot sort of atmosphere. They tried to luxuriate it. In exploitation films, you see what the place really looked like, you see the bars and mom-and-pop restaurants.

I’ve had people write that I’ve seen too many movies. In what other art form would being an expert be considered a negative? If I were a poet, would I be criticized for knowing too much about Sappho? Or Aristotle?

Richard Linklater

The most unique property of cinema is how it lets you mold time, whether it’s over a long or a very brief period.

The essence of you probably doesn’t change and that’s really one of the concerns of [“Before Midnight”]. Have Celine and Jessie changed? They are still themselves; they seem very connected to the same person they were at 23 and yet life has this way of attaching things to them, whether it’s children or just life experience and responsibility. It’s a very different life at 23 where you could just get off a train with no one waiting on you back home, no schedule. When we meet them the second time they are very scheduled. He has a plane to catch, he is at work, and she is grounded in the city she lives in. So you see the reality closing in even though it’s still this romantic encounter. By the time of the third film they are in the real world, we see their social interactions and they are much more grounded.

I’ve always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you’re doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

James Wan

We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you’re going to find in terms of craft. You can’t scare people if they see the seams.

When you’re watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium, you’re out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there. Whereas horror films and thrillers are designed to put the audience into that box, into that aquarium.

Todd Solondz

People have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

[My film “Happiness” is] not for everyone and it’s not designed for everyone and I don’t think I’ll ever write anything that’s designed to appeal to everyone. If you want sympathetic characters, it’s easy enough to do: you just give someone cancer and, of course, we’ll all feel horribly sad and sorry. You make anyone a victim and people feel that way. But that’s not of interest to me as a filmmaker or as a writer. I may be accused of a certain kind of misanthropy but I think I could argue the opposite. I think that it’s only by acknowledging the flaws, the foibles, the failings and so forth of who we are that we can in fact fully embrace the all of who we are. People say I’m cruel or that the film’s cruel, but I think rather it exposes the cruelty and I think that certainly the capacity for cruelty is the most difficult, the most painful thing for any of us to acknowledge. That we are at all capable. And yet I think that it exists as much as the capacity for kindness and it’s only the best of us that are able to suppress, sublimate, re-channel and so forth these baser instincts, but I see them to some degree at play as a regular part of life in very subtle ways and not so subtle ways. I don’t think that after the seventh grade that these impulses evaporate. So, from my perspective, I’m trying to be honest with what I see and what I’ve experienced and what I believe is true to our nature.

Jeff Nichols

I feel like when you write, you have to have a personal core to a story if you have any hope of it translating to an audience. There are certain emotions you have throughout your life that are palpable, you can feel them; they hurt. Every film I’ve made, I can point to one of those emotions, and for [“Mud”] it was going to be heartbreak. I can create all these plot lines, but they have to service that… By the time you get to the end of [the film], that thematic idea has just seeped into the story. You haven’t attacked it head on; you’ve been able to let your audience absorb it into their bloodstream.

I remember I was in junior high school and I was going to write a short story about mobsters, or New York mobsters. I think I had just seen a Scorsese film. And I told my dad that. And he was like, “You haven’t ever been to New York.” And I said, “Nah, but that’s where mobsters live.” And he basically said, “Why don’t you write something about Arkansas?” And a window in my mind opened. I realized all of a sudden that I had access to something that was interesting, that the rest of the world couldn’t write about, because I was the one there.